The Capuchin church is a religious building in the city of Venice, located in the Cannaregio district. The church is dedicated to Mary and Saint Francis, but takes its name from the convent which, built at the beginning of the 17th century, was demolished following the Napoleonic suppressions.
The land on which the church was later erected was initially granted
in 1612 to a group of Capuchin nuns, who two years later began building
the church, dedicated to the Madonna and to Saint Francis, with a small
convent attached and a vegetable garden that reached at the edge of the
lagoon. The building was consecrated in 1623.
With the Napoleonic
edict of 1811 which established the suppression of religious orders, the
convent was closed and later demolished to make way for a school
building. The church instead remained open for worship, becoming a
branch first of the parish of the Madonna dell'Orto and then of that of
San Girolamo, when in 1952 the latter church was reopened for worship.
The brick facade is characterized by a very simple structure
tripartite by pilasters and finished with a triangular tympanum which
includes a rose window in the centre. Above the portal is a sculpture
depicting the Virgin with a putto, dating back to the end of the 16th
century and attributed to Girolamo Campagna. The façade is completed by
two large arched side windows and an elliptical rose window.
Inside, very simple and with a single nave, there are two side altars
and a high altar surmounted by the painting The Virgin with Saints
Francesco, Chiara, Marco and Orsola by Palma il Giovane. In the
right-hand altar is the Death of St. Joseph, a seventeenth-century
Paduan school painting by an anonymous artist, while on the left-hand
altar there is an ancient copy of an icon. On the ceiling there are
three empty squares, which housed three paintings by Palma il Giovane,
now lost, which had been donated by the noblewoman Marietta Foscarini
during the construction of the church.